Election Day. I and the rest of the American crew had filed absentee ballots – but I broadcast my normal Election Day get-out-vote message to the voters back home.
The next night, Curt, Steve Lindsey, and I did a live shot with Jay Leno on
Mission Control radioed that we had futures as comics if we got tired of space.
We communicated with Earth by radio, television, and E-mail. We did a televised news conference and a hookup with schoolkids from all over the country who asked better questions than the reporters. John Glenn High School in New Concord was one of the schools. Another was the Center of Science and Industry, a learning center in Columbus headed by Kathy Sullivan, a former astronaut and deep-sea explorer.
I found E-mail, which was still new to me, a fast and effective means of communicating. I E-mailed Annie and the family, who were staying in Houston during the flight, and then I decided to try for a different first. Steve Robinson was my tutor, and once while I was slowly pecking out a message he asked if I was sending another E- mail to Annie.
“Nope. To the president,” I said.
“What?”
“An E-mail’s probably never been sent to the president of the United States from space,” I said. “And he’d appreciate it, too.”
He did. He replied the next day, and described an eighty-three-year-old woman who had told him space was okay for a young fellow like me.
The importance of the cameras that waited at the ready on Velcro patches beside most of the shuttle’s windows came to the fore with Hurricane Mitch. It had made landfall in Honduras on the day before our launch, and hung over Honduras and Nicaragua for several days, dumping twenty-five inches of rain, causing mudslides that swept away entire villages, and killing over seven thousand people. A few days into our flight, mission control called for photographs of the devastated area.
One of the laptops on the flight deck was set up to track Discovery on its orbits around the world. By following the track on the screen, you could anticipate when you were approaching an area that needed to be photographed. You couldn’t wait until you recognized Honduras, for instance, because at 17,500 miles an hour – five miles per second – the photo angles you wanted would have slid by already. We got the shots we wanted.
In some cases, the higher orbit of Discovery meant more spectacular views than I had seen from Friendship 7. Coming over the Florida Keys at one point in the mission for example, I looked out toward the north and was startled that I could see Lake Erie. In fact, I could look beyond it right into Canada. The entire East Coast was visible – the hook of Cape Cod, Long Island, Cape Hatteras, down to the clear coral sands of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, south to Cuba, and beyond.
A night of thunderstorms over South Africa produced a view of a field of lightning flashes that must have stretched over eight hundred or a thousand miles, the flashes looking like bubbles of light breaking by the hundreds on the surface of a boiling pot.
All the while, our views of Earth were stolen from the time we gave the eighty-three experiments on board. Each member kept on his or her timeline, and as we neared the end of the mission all of the experiments were working and successful. This remained our primary mission, and we were confident that we were making real contributions to science.
As Discovery approached the end of the mission, the crew wrapped up the various experiments and began preparations for reentry. It was like spring cleaning in a house in which every wall and ceiling were just more floors on which things had been tossed. Although we had done a quite a good job of keeping the shuttle’s interior tidy as we went along, notes, copies of our timeline tasks, and flight-data files detailing our work on the experiments were stuck to Velcro and duct tape and behind bungeecords all around the mid-and flight decks, SpaceHab, and the tunnel leading back.
Once the cabins had been policed, Chiaki and I set up one of the seats for resuiting. We retrieved the helmets and suits, started with Curt, and then helped the rest of the crew get ready. Then we got the rest of the seats in place and suited up ourselves, while Curt and Steve Lindsey closed the pay-load bay doors and oriented Discovery for the de-orbit burn that would begin its descent into the atmosphere. We were all suited and strapped in before the burn.
Down at the Cape, chief astronaut Charlie Precourt was aloft in a Gulfstream testing the crosswinds at the shuttle’s three-mile landing strip. Crosswinds at the Cape put off the decision about starting the burn until the last minute. The big glider gets only one chance to land and conditions must be right; crosswind limits are set relatively low. The clock ticked down, and I worried that we might have to go around again and land at Edwards. But with only twenty seconds left, a voice from Mission Control came through the headphones: “Discovery, you have go for burn.”
The OMS engines fired over the Indian Ocean a little over an hour before landing. It wasn’t the dramatic kick I had felt in Friendship 7. It was smoother, though still definite. The slight dip in speed, from 24,950 feet per second to 24,479, was enough to take Discovery out of its orbital equilibrium and start it toward Earth. We flew over California at Mach 24 and an altitude of forty miles. The Gs never reached more than two.
As we descended, we gulped various high-salt concoctions that were supposed to help us adjust to gravity again. Reentry and return to gravity would reverse the fluid shift we had experienced. At the moment we didn’t need the fluid, but the high salt content was meant to fool our bodies into retaining it until we were on the ground when gravity would take over and increased fluid would be necessary. For reentry, under our pressure suits each wore G suits, the leggings and lower-torso wrappings that we would inflate to keep fluid from rushing to the lower body from the brain. All of this was supposed to keep us from getting light-headed and dizzy. when we were first back on Earth. The stuff I was drinking was lemon-lime flavored, and by the time I’d downed three of the five eight-ounce bags, it tasted awful.
Falling through the atmosphere in Discovery wasn’t the dire experience it had been in Friendship 7. This time there was no possibility I might burn up. The tiles on the under side fended off the heat, and they didn’t boil away like the Mercury capsule’s heat shield. A glow but no fireball enveloped us as we descended. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been visible from the windowless mid-deck.
Curt took the orbiter through a series of banking maneuvers to reduce speed and altitude and bring Discovery onto its final glide path. He told Mission Control he had the runway in sight. Two minutes later, I felt the orbiter flare and then touch down on the long Cape Canaveral runway. The main gear hit first, and the nose wheel a few seconds later with a bang right under our feet on the mid-deck floor. The mission elapsed time was eight days, twenty-one hours, and forty minutes, and it was 12:04 pm Eastern Standard Time on Earth. We had made 134 orbits and travelled 3.6 million miles before we rolled to a stop.
Curt thought I should give a homecoming statement. “Houston, this is PS two, otherwise known as John,” I said. “One G and I feel fine.”
That wasn’t strictly true, however. My stomach was revolting against all that salt-loaded lemon-lime gunk. A fair number of astronauts get sick on landing whether they fluid-load or not; I might have been stricken anyway. The flight surgeon asked if I wanted to come out on a stretcher. Astronauts had done that before. It was perfectly legitimate. I said, “Absolutely not.” I made it from the orbiter to the crew transport vehicle with the rest of the crew, got unsuited, and then the stuff all came up. I had absorbed none of it, and my body was now demanding fluid in order to feed oxygen to my brain for equilibrium and balance. I was dizzy and shaky.
But I knew one thing. I was going to walk out of there onto the runway if it killed me. Annie, Lyn, and Dave and his family were waiting with the other families and the welcome delegations, the ground staff and the television cameras – and through those cameras an audience around the country and the world. Going back to space had defied the expectations for my age. I was going to defy them again by getting out of the transport vehicle onto the ground under my own power and joing my crewmates for the traditional walk-around under the orbiter. I drank some water and began to feel better.
Out on the runway, under a bright midday sun, Dan Goldin was saying nice things that I heard about only
